Karl Kraus Quotes

Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.

I majored in psychology, and I still love listening to people's problems.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

I first wanted to be a psychiatrist. I decided against that in medical school when I discovered that psychiatrists didn't, in reality, do what they did on TV.

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

Public safety is too important to be left to psychiatry.

You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It's become almost impossible for someone to "go mad" in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently "went mad" and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard.

But mad people never die. That's a well-known fact. They've nothing to trouble them, and they live for ever.

Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience - who knows when such a malady may strike?

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.

The thing about crazy people; they don't know they are crazy, that's what make them crazy.

There is no difference between acute schizophrenia and a world at war.

Lots of people say if you dredge too much stuff up, you'll go crazy - "You'll go insane!" But for a comedian, insanity is not a problem. It's a goal.

The schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill. I have been told by people who have been through the mad experience how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna from Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is difficult not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone comes back to us again.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.

I have a plan-to go mad.

[While] my life started taking on all the problems of addiction. So that took me off into an area where relationships were absolutely impossible to handle on any real level. . . . Even communicating with other people was impossible.

I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.

Take heed of mad folks in a narrow place.

Does it ever occur to you, Mama, that my grandfather is a lunatic?